


the dreamers

by arbitrarily



Series: archived [4]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Codependency, F/M, M/M, Multi, Pre-Canon, Sibling Incest, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-14
Updated: 2010-08-14
Packaged: 2018-11-02 23:05:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10954596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: He is a very good forger. He can forget himself. He never forges the ones he loves.





	the dreamers

**Author's Note:**

> Written August 2010.
> 
> Also, this is a blatant rip-off of Bertolucci's _The Dreamers_. Or, Arthur has a twin sister. Mind the tags.

 

As the people you love stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving - not coming from any place; not arriving at any place. Just driving, counting off time. Now you are here, at 7:43. Now you are here, at 7:44. Now you are . . .   
  
Gone.  
  
Synecdoche New York  
  
  
  
I dreamed I was holding  
A double-edged sword close to my body -  
What does it foretell? It tells  
That I shall meet you soon.  
  
Man’yōshū, 1965 Translation  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The two never looked that much alike. It’s a small thing, but it’s something Eames will find himself returning to in later years. They never looked that much alike, and behaviorally speaking they diverged even further. Everything that was light about her was heavy in Arthur, and everything she feared emerged as confidence in him. That made them difficult to mimic; it made them both impossible to forge.  
  
Eames is a very good forger. Lesson number one being, of course, you have to forget yourself.  
  
Lesson number two is more complex and fraught with temptation to break: never forge the ones you love.  
  
You will never, ever get it right.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
In early March Arthur will receive a greeting card. It is the expensive, tacky sort, the sort that sings upon its opening, and as Arthur parts the brightly colored and backed paper a tinny rendition of “Happy Birthday” rings out in the warehouse.  
  
“It’s your birthday?” Ariadne will say. “I had no idea.”  
  
“Ah, yes,” Eames will say and stretch. “Happy Birthday, to the lot of you,” he’ll say cryptically, something unkind stirring in him.  
  
Arthur will be gracious, but he will wave them off, his smile the stretched sad thing age lends itself to as the birthdays arrive in faster succession.  
  
“There’s two of them, you know,” Eames will tell Ariadne after, when Arthur retreats to his office and the door closes quietly behind him, venetian blinds drawn over the mottled glass in the center of the door. Ariadne’s brow will furrow, and this will be how Eames will know she has begun to dream of Arthur, that her crush has blossomed into something less than innocent, and perhaps later this will be something he will use to his own benefit if not his own amusement.  
  
“There’s a twin,” he will tell her, and she will raise her eyebrows.  
  
“Who’s his twin?” She will ask the question mildly, but Eames will be able to detect a note of betrayal there, a sense that she’s an outsider. He is a very good forger. It’s why Cobb was willing to brave Mombasa for him and why the referral came through all those years ago and not enough years after. It’s why Arthur scowled at him that first day, but explained the job all the same. He’s good at what he does. If asked, he thinks his explanation would be a wink and a nod, a flash of a poker chip maybe, people love a gambler, people love it when they think a man is in it for little more than a laugh, a chance at greater stakes; there is something easy to trust in that, a man you believe has left his claim to fate and probability. That’s what he’d say. What he knows is more frightening than that and something people have no desire to hear. Not only can he read a person well, for example, the moment referenced before: Eames will be able to feel and know all the petty anxiety Ariadne is awash with, the illogical competitive sense that she matters less than Eames to Arthur, true as it may be at this moment in time, and that both men have cheated her out of an accurate portrayal of Arthur.  
  
“Isabelle. The other is Isabelle,” he’ll say. “This, darling, is Arthur.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They meet in Paris. There is a used bookstore with its wares set out in baskets on the street. The two of them stand there, the man with an open book and the woman openly staring at him.  
  
“‘s rude to stare, love,” he says, but he arches an eyebrow, teasing in nature, and she smiles similarly in kind.  
  
“Not if you plan on acting on it,” is her answer.  
  
“And you are . . . ?”  
  
“Isabelle. This is Arthur.”  
  
“Your boyfriend?”  
  
“My brother.”  
  
“You don’t fucking say.”  
  
“He’s my twin, as it were.”  
  
“And does your twin speak?”  
  
“Say something, Arthur.” The other man looks up from his book for the barest of seconds and catches Eames’s eye.  
  
“‘Something.’”  
  
“Cute,” Eames deadpans, and then he feigns embarrassment. “And where might my manners be, yeah?” He extends a hand. “Eames.”  
  
Isabelle arches an eyebrow but she takes his hand loosely in her own. Her skin is cold to the touch and she shakes his hand limply. “That a first or a last name?”  
  
“Last. My first, if inquiring minds - “  
  
Isabelle holds up a hand. Fresh manicure, he notes, a polished pale pink too demure and girlish for her hardened face. “Don’t. I don’t much care. Once you start collecting names, you start collecting people, and I really have no desire or room for that. _Eames_ is good enough.” Beside her Arthur rolls his eyes.  
  
“She always so rough on the bollocks, eh?”  
  
“You have no idea.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They go for drinks, a cafe much like the same Eames had just abandoned, an unpaid tab and a broken tea saucer left at his table.  
  
“Where did you come from?” Isabelle asks him.  
  
“You mean just this moment then?” He hooks his thumb over his shoulder, gesturing down the street behind him despite the fact he had not taken this street at all and had come from a burgundy-soaked cafe a block down, a lane perpendicular to the street at his back. “Or, all, ‘whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life,’ et cetera, et cetera, _David Copperfield_ hogwash?”  
  
“The latter. You reek of red. I’m certain I know where you’ve just been, though the specifics may escape me.” Arthur remains silent, but the way he watches both Eames and Isabelle, his eyes bright and alert despite the hard blankness to his mask-like expression, he feels as active a participant as either of them.  
  
He tells her he was in a port in Algiers. Arthur indicates nothing, but Isabelle leans in, excited.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
That night it rains.  
  
Their place in Paris is built like a maze: narrow hallways packed even tighter with filled bookshelves that end in doors which open to yet another hall, more books and more shelves, ornately framed watercolors of drooping flowers in vases on the walls, crystal doorknobs sharp under a curved palm. The last door opens into a small room with a wall of windows, French doors in the center, wrought iron curling behind the panes of glass, and further beyond, a tiny stone balcony, scarcely enough room for one person to lie flat.  
  
The flat, he finds, was once their parents. They do not speak of their parents much, an occasional _them_ dropped unemotionally in a story, and Eames knows the two are too old to necessarily have to live with their parents, mid-twenties would be his guess, so it comes as a surprise when he finally asks of them, and Isabelle shrugs and says, “Oh. They’re dead. I thought you knew,” like Eames is their oldest and dearest friend around.  
  
He does not actually have anywhere to stay in this city, so Isabelle, not Arthur, offers him a room.  
  
(“You’re a thief, aren’t you. A criminal,” she says to him, the big brass key still in the door, and his eyes drift to the big brass bed in the center of the room.  
  
“That going to be a problem, love?” he asks.  
  
Her smile is sly. “Quite the contrary. _Love_.”)  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Isabelle’s left elbow is double-jointed. She shows him at the giant butcher block kitchen table how she can rotate her arm around until it is bent grotesque and circus-like, a proud grin cracking her face in half.  
  
“An innate talent of yours, I presume?” he says. Isabelle shakes her head, pops a green grape in her mouth.  
  
“I broke my arm when I was a kid,” she says as she chews.  
  
“Yeah? How’d that work then?”  
  
“Arthur told me I could fly. I believed him. Grape?” The proffered fruit dangles from her fingertips.  
  
Later they will sit side by side in the matching straight back chairs in the library. The books look old and unused on their shelves, the titles primarily in French, of those he can make out, and he knows the two can speak French rather well, but they rarely use it in front of him.  
  
Arthur pokes his head in, frowns a little at the glasses of deep red wine the two of them hold and the white upholstered chairs they sit in.  
  
“Dinner in ten,” he says, and just as quickly, leaves.  
  
“He is very strict,” Isabelle pouts. She leans in, her voice rough and confidential. “He made me go to university.” She pulls a sour face.  
  
“Where did you want to go, hmm?”  
  
“The stage,” she teases.  
  
And then, “you want to know a secret?”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Eames already knew about the dream sharing. Arthur looks genuinely surprised at the development, his fork and knife still poised over his veal, and Isabelle’s eyes grow wide.  
  
“I knew it!” she trumpets. “I told Arthur, didn’t I tell you?”  
  
“How could you possibly have known that?” Eames drawls.  
  
“You look like a soul who has travelled far in time,” she says grandly. They don’t ask him where he learned it, they don’t ask him about his work, or if he works, what minds he has entered. Instead Arthur resumes eating and Isabelle pours more wine.  
  
“You learn the dreams from Arthur?” Isabelle looks mock offended.  
  
“We learned together,” she corrects.  
  
“Your father?”  
  
“ _Mon oncle_ ,” she says, smirks. “Our uncle. He was in the trade.”  
  
“Was, eh?”  
  
“He led us to believe such an enterprise has a rather limited professional life span.”  
  
“He dead too?”  
  
She tsk, tsks, “so callous.” The fact she didn’t answer the question does not escape his notice.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
There are rules in the dreams, she tells him. Her face is very grave and she braces her hands on either side of his face.  
  
“Commit the impossible.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Her fingers are stained a deep purple from the blueberries her fingers mash into a cobbler.  
  
“A taste?” she teases, and slides her index finger into first Eames’s mouth and then Arthur’s. Arthur tastes more spit and skin than the fruit.  
  
(Much later, in the future, Eames will be unable to recall if they had stood in that dark cavern of a kitchen in their Parisian flat or if they had instead stood in an open field, a dream, and the knife had been large and sharp in Isabelle’s hand and the blueberries had tasted juicy and sweet).  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The first time she kisses him is in the dream. She kisses him like this will be a secret, like this will be something that goes unsaid, and they go from a small boardwalk, noisy with the night, to an abandoned wood and he kisses her back, he grips her upper arm tight and he kisses her and thinks he sees a small tawny doe skip away into the wilderness behind her.  
  
When they wake, she presses a finger to her lips and smiles, that same secret look on her face.  
  
“That’s nice,” she says, and Eames has always liked his women as a challenge, but never as a riddle. He watches her disentangle her line, her arms too thin and pale for this line of work, and he smirks.  
  
He thinks of Arthur, and then he smirks.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
She takes him to the Louvre. “Been before, pet. Not impressed,” he told her that morning, a burnt stack of pancakes on the stove and a skillet cooling in the sink, caked egg on the inside of the pan. Isabelle rolled her eyes, told him his other offer was to loaf around their place all day while Arthur worked, a statement he doesn’t think either of them fully understood in its entirety, so he took her arm and she took his change for cab fare.  
  
Outside the museum she slides her sunglasses on, red frames and the tint of the shades are not dark enough to hide her eyes from him. She turns to him, suddenly earnest in the afternoon sun.  
  
“Don’t choose a side,” she says, eyes bright. He stops in his tracks.  
  
“Love, I don’t even know what that means.”  
  
“Everyone always chooses. When there is two of anything, you will always come down on the side of one, you’ll always like one more than the other. Don’t do that. Please try not to do that. Consider us one of each.”  
  
“That what you like so much about your Arthur?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“He’ll never have to pick.”  
  
She frowns. “But he will. We both will.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Sex with Isabelle is strange, he finds. Her hands skitter over him, nervous and unsure despite her own poise and confidence.  
  
He sleeps with Isabelle the same day as the Louvre. She comes to him, that room with the big brass key and the big brass bed, and she leans over him, her body warm even through the blanket between them.  
  
“Ever thought to knock?” he teases her, butts his head against hers like they’re animals, ghosts his mouth over hers, and she laughs quietly.  
  
“I live here,” she says, and pushes him down by the shoulders.  
  
She leaves him in the middle of the night. He discovers it when he wakes, the room too dark to see the clock, but not dark enough for him to recognize the emptiness of his bed, more feeling than sight anyway. He wanders the hall for the bathroom, no lamps lit, and he finds her. He finds her accidentally, through an open door.  
  
He finds her, naked, and wound around Arthur’s clothed body, Arthur’s slender fingers spread low over the dip of her hip.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
She keeps old volumes of T.S. Eliot near her bed, and when Eames reaches for one, begins to rifle through the pages, he finds old photographs, old receipts with words written on the back in faded ink, postcards. He picks a postcard from the litter, a dated photograph of the New York skyline, and scribbled on the back in stark handwriting, all capital letters that slant left: NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE. Under that is a single letter, the first letter of the alphabet, a smear of black ink next to it. On the ride side of the card is her own name and address, a different address than the one they reside in now, a place in London (and Eames had no idea Isabelle had lived in London, she never mentioned it, and he imagines her in some sort of wretched Shakespearean theatre troupe, clutching red handkerchiefs while she screamed of ghosts and guilt). Her name and the London address are written in painstakingly neat writing; it is dated from nearly six years ago.  
  
It is the neat penmanship Arthur had afforded her name, her address, that makes Eames feel close to ashamed. No, not ashamed, but almost guilty. He feels as though he has seen something deeply personal he was never meant to see, that this is why Isabelle houses these postcards, these paper mementos with meaning only to her and only to Arthur within the pages of Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ (a receipt from a cafe in Paris, the amount in francs, and Eames knows that means it’s old, pre-Euro, pre-2000, 2001, fuck, he’s awful with dates, and there’s an unused train ticket to Antwerp, one-way, the sort of thing bought as a threat, and there’s a small sketch of a pirate on a cocktail napkin, a restaurant’s name in Dutch interrupting the shaky hull of his ship, and in a lopsided speech bubble it reads: “AI,” and under that, “AYE,” and he imagines their initials joined with pirates are another joke that belongs exclusively to them) ( _but to what purpose disturbing a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know_ ).  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They get stoned. Isabelle has an extensive vinyl collection, and she carpets the floor with the individual square sleeves. “Pick one,” she tells Eames, and then she proceeds to chide him, shake her head, say, “no, not that one,” until his hand stills over Tom Waits’s _Rain Dogs_ and she claps her hands together in approval.  
  
“You could have just told me, love, instead of pretending to let me pick.”  
  
She has just inhaled, the joint still held up to her lips. “More fun this way,” she says behind a cloud of smoke, her voice still tight with it.  
  
He finger fucks her and Arthur watches, eyes narrowed and his shirt sleeves rolled. After, he sucks Eames’s fingers into his mouth, Isabelle still shiny and ripe on the digits, and Eames moans, near comically wanton.  
  
“He do this often?” Eames hisses in her ear, but they both know (the three of them know) Eames doesn’t actually mind. The sigh that slips through her teeth is infused with amusement.  
  
“What makes you assume this is a common occurrence?”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
She is near silent while he does it, her hips making small movements forward onto his fingers each time he pushes them back into her. Tom’s still rumbling scratchy on the record player, until he’s not, and the only sounds in the room are his own voice, urging her on, little dirty things he hopes Arthur can hear from across the room - “c’mon, baby, that’s it, there’s a girl, you like that, you like that, don’t you? so fucking wet, that’s it, that’s it” - and the occasional sharp breaths from Isabelle, her bottom lip caught beneath her front teeth, the sticky, wet noise his three fingers make inside her (and that, _that_ , Eames hopes above all Arthur can hear, that he can not only see but hear how dripping wet his sister is, how wet he has made her, the both of them, Eames with his fingers and Arthur with his eyes). The three of them are watching between her legs, Eames and Isabelle looking down her body where his fingers disappear, and Arthur isn’t even trying to disguise the fact he is watching, too. His eyes drift over the both of them, taking in the debauched expressions Eames pulls, the way his mouth bites at Isabelle’s ear and his tongue lingers on the long slope of her neck, teeth pulling at the black lace of her thin bra strap.  
  
He watches Isabelle’s face too, all the minute changes to it as Eames increases pressure, speed, when he adds another finger - her mouth opens and she slams her hips down, fucking his hand. Eames catches Arthur’s eye then, but there’s nothing to read there, just dark eyes, maybe blown pupils, but they’re all stoned anyway. Isabelle wraps her fingers around Eames wrist when she is close, makes this tiny desperate noise in the back of her throat he feels more than hears, and then she’s coming. Her fingernails bite half-moon indents into the skin of his wrist, and she sounds like she’s drowning. It’s funny then. It’s funny, because Eames still has his fingers curled inside her, he’s still here, her weight full against him as she leans back, but he feels an interloper. He looks up, and Arthur is staring at Isabelle, his breath coming fast through his nose, like he’s doing some sort of zen bullshit breathing exercise. And he’s watching her face, he’s watching her as she plays at the dying fish routine: mouth still gaping, eyes glassy, lungs expelling breath faster than they can take it in. He watches as Arthur’s eyes drift down his sister’s body, the dusky peaked nipple visible under the thin pink camisole, her cunt covered by Eames’s hand, but his eyes don’t linger long; they return to her face, and Eames can understand on an objective level what Arthur is seeing, but he’s sure there’s more.  
  
(Eames takes his fingers out of her, wet with her. Arthur sucks on them, cleans them, meticulously so, and for the first time in this entire exchange, Isabelle moans.  
  
Eames sucks Arthur off. Isabelle bites at his ear, crowds around him as he takes Arthur’s cock down as far as he can, the head of it hitting the back of his throat, and he swallows fast. Arthur bucks, his fingers white-knuckled around the arms of his chair. “What’s he taste like?” Isabelle hisses hot against his ear. She leans in a little more, and her hair cascades down over his face, over the root of Arthur’s cock as Eames pulls back a little to breathe. “Fuck,” Arthur pants, the ends of her dark hair brushing over him. Eames watches as Arthur threads his fingers through her hair and pulls a little, her hand flat against his bare thigh. Arthur whines, his hips buck a little, and Eames’s mouth moves with him. It doesn’t take much after that, and Eames isn’t sure whether that’s more his or Isabelle’s doing.  
  
Eames swallows him down. When he reaches to wipe his lips, Isabelle stops him. She kisses him square on the mouth, her own mouth searching and hungry and wet).  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“What am I? Some sort of proxy for whatever wildly fucked up thing you’ve got going with your own sis, eh?”  
  
Arthur frowns.  
  
“Of course not,” he says plainly. Eames half expects Arthur to rise and come kiss him. Arthur does no such thing. He remains seated at the large desk, an open ledger in front of him and an uncapped pen in hand.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“Everyone is everyone, Eames. That’s the part no one bothers to tell you. Everything he experiences, I experience it too. Everything that touches me, touches him. The difference, and there is a difference between Arthur and I, I know you’ve seen it, is that he doesn’t acknowledge it. He doesn’t look at it the way I do, he doesn’t embrace it. That’s Arthur. But, he knows it’s there.” She considers her glass of wine. “He knows I’m there,” she says, quieter.  
  
“Are you talking about dreams?” he asks dumbly, bluntly. Isabelle takes a final sip of her wine. He thinks she looks sad, or maybe she just looks drunk. She could be both.  
  
“You’re not paying attention,” she scolds, grabs at his wrist with thin fingers, painted a lurid, cheap purple. “I haven’t been talking of dreams for awhile now.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
In the dream she takes him to an attic. The floorboards creak and there is yellowed lace everywhere, a wrought iron bed frame without a mattress, several porcelain dolls without heads. Mirrors encircle the room, some cracked, some missing jagged panes of glass.  
  
“What is this place?”  
  
“I invented it,” she says, and then she dives out the window.  
  
He wakes alone.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Eames pockets a photograph of Isabelle. It is a younger Isabelle. She is walking down a city street, European, he guesses, based on the edges of architecture that occupy the outer reaches of the photograph, the part of a license plate on a parked car.  
  
She is smiling, her face buoyant with it and alive. He thinks she is eighteen in the photo. He wants her to be eighteen in it, and he’s not entirely sure why. On the back, in surprisingly masculine and sloppy handwriting it reads: LET US GO THEN A & I.  
  
He imagines Arthur took the picture. He can almost imagine it. They are young, they are eighteen, “we always behaved as though we were orphans - Arthur went the Dickensian route, but I went Kipling - raised by the wild!” He doesn’t know where to imagine them - Amsterdam or Copenhagen or Prague, Berlin, Geneva - but Isabelle had taken off, giddy and punch-drunk, it was winter, February maybe, or later, early spring, her scarf loose around her pale neck, woolen coat snugly fastened. And then she had turned. And there was Arthur. He knows how she felt in that moment, or at least he thinks he does. The city, the world, had beckoned and she had answered, she was charging for it, but one last glance, just to be sure - he was still there.  
  
He took the photograph from the drawer in Arthur’s desk. He had never felt closer and more a part of the two of them.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“It’s weird to think about, isn’t it?” she says to Eames. “To imagine knowing someone you were never introduced to. Knowing someone who was created at the same time you were. Doesn’t that seem like the strangest thing to you?”  
  
He frowns, thinks the broad is bloody daft. “‘Spose. Never gave it much thought, I reckon.” He pauses, considers fetching himself one of Arthur’s cigars he never smokes. “Why - do you?”  
  
Isabelle laughs cruelly. “Hardly. It’s all I’ve ever known.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They place bets in the dreams. Eames is never sure what the stakes are, but he always throws his hat into the ring. The twins compete in a strange fashion, all revolving around this world of dream building they have created for themselves, absurd stunts no one could ever live through.  
  
Isabelle tightrope walks between two buildings caught in the clouds. (“I was a gymnast,” she whispered to him in bed the night before, and the result from Eames was to be expected). Arthur falls halfway across, his body disappearing beneath them, the two of them too high to see his body as it hits the ground.  
  
“Defeated, darling?” Eames teases Arthur in the kitchen when they return. The sun has just begun to set here.  
  
“Take the forfeit?” Isabelle challenges, and Arthur meets her eyes, his nod barely perceptible. She smiles. “On your knees then.”  
  
“Here? Really?” he asks, but he’s already bending at the knee, the floor likely cold under him, and Isabelle stands over him, Eames still seated at the kitchen table. Arthur’s belt is loud in the kitchen as he undoes it, his zipper even louder.  
  
“What’s this then?” Eames asks, and Isabelle glares at him.  
  
“He lost,” she says simply.  
  
Arthur concentrates, and if there is an ounce of self-awareness to him as a result of their observation, it is impossible to tell. He is caught in profile, and all Eames can really see is the rapid blur of Arthur’s curled fist as he pumps himself. He rises to his knees slightly, and there is the start of a grunt he stops with his teeth, and then it is just the hush of friction as skin rubs over skin and Arthur’s heightened breathing.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Eames catches them in conversation later in the kitchen. He can hear the soft murmur from afar, and he approaches quietly, lingers behind the old oak door and listens. Isabelle is chopping onions, the acrid scent eye-watering even from a distance.  
  
“Arthur,” she says, and there is the sound of the knife slicing through the vegetable and then meeting the dulled wood cutting board. “Arthur. I’m talking.”  
  
Eames can see Arthur’s profile through the crack of the door, just his face, his body interrupted by the brass hinges embedded in the doorjamb. Arthur looks up, the room suddenly quieter, and Eames realizes that Arthur had been typing. Now he is still.  
  
“What is it?” he asks.  
  
Isabelle still has the knife in her hand, but she is not using it.  
  
“I want you to listen,” she says.  
  
Arthur’s eyes glance down at this computer screen and then back to her. “Why?”  
  
“Because. Arthur?”  
  
“Hmm?” he hums, distracted. His eyes are on his laptop again.  
  
“I love you. You know that?”  
  
Arthur looks back up, brow furrowed. “I love you too,” he says, casual.  
  
“You love me too?” she says and smiles, small. “That’s funny.” It is clear Arthur’s attention has wandered and Isabelle is still holding the knife. “Are you listening? It’s forever, right?”  
  
Arthur closes his laptop and crosses his arms over his chest, leans the kitchen chair back on two legs; Eames can only see a fraction of that. “What’s forever?”  
  
“The two of us,” she says quietly. “Right?”  
  
“Yes,” Arthur says, a note of concern, the singular word drawn out. He leans forward, the two front legs returning to the black and white tiled floor with a small scrape. “Why? Did Eames say that?”  
  
Isabelle looks confused, her own arms crossed over her chest as well, knife abandoned to the pile of chopped onions. “What did Eames say?”  
  
Arthur worries his bottom lip, his face stormy. He stands then, walks over and stands on the opposite side of the butcher block table. Eames can only see his back. “That we’re monsters, freaks,” he says.  
  
Isabelle offers a small shake of her head, but beyond that ignores what Arthur has said. She reaches a hand out, her fingers resting over Arthur’s. He doesn’t move from her.  
  
“I just want you to tell me that it’s forever,” she tells their hands. She looks up, and if their eyes meet, Eames couldn’t tell you. If Arthur smiles, he doesn’t know. If he frowns, if there are tears in his eyes, from the onions or from her, he has no idea. “It’s forever,” she whispers, and Eames misses that part, too.  
  
Arthur reaches and cradles the back of her head with his hand and draws her forward. They both lean over the counter, hands still touching, and he rests his forehead against hers.  
  
He might have spoken; it may have sounded like an echo.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Later, years and years later, when Eames meets Cobb through that fucking referral, when he meets Cobb’s pretty, pretty wife, and he meets surprise in the form of a resurfaced Arthur and his finely tailored suit of armor -  
  
He’ll understand a little. He’ll understand when Arthur doesn’t speak of Mal and why he gets so silently furious when Eames in fouler tempers tries to draw her out of him. She is a kinder and gentler Isabelle, the female edge of the geometric pattern the three created - the one who loses herself to the dream.  
  
When he meets Ariadne, he wants to laugh. He wants to think “clean slate,” but those things are never true, are they.  
  
(Arthur will pass on an invitation to join Eames and Ariadne for a drink.  
  
“He lives like a monk, doesn’t he?” she will say. Eames will be unable to stop the laugh that erupts from him.  
  
“Darling, you have no idea,” he will tell her, and Ariadne will nod her head knowingly, as though what Eames had just said serves as an affirmation for her initial statement. You have no idea. Eames will still be able to see Arthur’s naked body sprawled out beneath a wall of windows, his sister’s similarly stripped lean and limber frame draped over him. She will have no earthly bloody idea.  
  
“You’ve known him awhile?”  
  
“Sure,” he'll say. "I can't for the life of me even remember how we met, you know?")  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
In the dream, Arthur takes them to a bull fight in Madrid.  
  
“Hemingway’d love you, my man, right?” Eames teases, and Arthur cracks a smile, the sun bright on his face, and Isabelle stands beside the both of them, her hand raised to shield her view, a similar grin cresting.  
  
Later there will be wine, sangria, Arthur will speak of time, the way it stretches here - ten minutes out there and over an hour here - and the sun will set as the seconds pass while they sleep in Paris. The hotel he has fashioned them is dark, the walls a deep red and the bed matches. And for the first time since meeting them, Eames feels taken aback, unsure, about the two of them.  
  
In the dream, Arthur kisses his sister. Maybe it is this sequence of events, the ordering of the active and the passive, the label to be designated to each twin, maybe this is what trips up Eames. Arthur kisses Isabelle, he grabs her by the back of the head, his fingers snarled in her hair, and Isabelle does not close her eyes when his lips press and mold to hers.  
  
Arthur fucks Isabelle. Eames is afraid to interrupt them, so he watches, watches the way Isabelle sinks down onto him and sounds Arthur rips from her. After Arthur comes, Eames goes to them - Isabelle stands and Eames licks at her, the taste of the two siblings rich, complimenting each other perfectly, their joined release dripping down the inside of her thigh.  
  
Later, they share him: Eames inside of Isabelle and Arthur inside of Eames. It is bizarre though, how little it seems they need him - the way Eames doesn’t really matter, the middle and forgotten piece. Arthur groans and reaches past him, his knuckles brushing the side of Isabelle’s face.  
  
There is nothing real about this moment. This is what he tells himself after - that Isabelle’s knees drawn to her chest, to his chest, her face young and eager, and the press of Arthur’s skin along his skin, the tight and painful, unforgiving way he filled him, moved into him, the slap of skin to skin he was unable to parse out as his against Isabelle or against Arthur, and maybe that was the point, maybe that’s what Isabelle had meant all those days ago that felt like years: they are one of each. You can have us both, she never said, but maybe that’s what she meant outside of the Louvre, they were both there for the taking, two halves of one whole.  
  
He is a very good forger. He is the best. He can fill in the things a person is unwilling to say aloud and trace the unspoken to the thought, the terrible, terrible thought too awful to leave a person’s lips.  
  
He can fill the space between two people. He can do that, too.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Their house takes on a haunted feel. They all submerge themselves in the dreams, and Arthur talks of business opportunities, claims he is doing research, and there is a coil of fear within Eames that he means Isabelle and himself are the subjects. He tries to fill that space with bravado, so he climbs those stairs and he gets lost in the mazes and reemerges in places he would never craft for himself: an American gas station, the Statue of Liberty, Red Square, an office building in Singapore.  
  
Isabelle is quiet and sullen, and Eames attempts to joke with her, draw out whatever it is she thinks she is hiding. She takes to the library, dismissive towards Eames and silent towards her brother.  
  
Eames finds her there later, Arthur and Isabelle alone.  
  
“I love you, I love you,” Arthur is panting, her body beneath his on the chaise lounge, the two of them mostly hidden by the rows of books no one has ever read. He is nude, and so is she, her back bowing beneath him and her hair obscuring her face. The city is bright outside the wall of windows behind them. “I love you so much,” he says.  
  
“For forever,” Isabelle says, and Arthur groans, “ _yes_.”  
  
Something twists unexpected in Eames’s chest. When he turns to leave, he can hear him still, gasping small words, _always, always, yes, forever, yes_.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The dream goes wrong. Isabelle was already hooked up, the case on the kitchen table, her face blissfully blank, and Arthur had said, _fuck_ , and Eames had rolled his own sleeves a beat after watching Arthur do the same.  
  
“You brought him here?” she asks in the dream, a blend of horror and betrayal on her face. “This was our place, Arthur. This was _ours_.”  
  
“Hey. Come on. I thought we could - “  
  
“Get him out!” she screams. “Get him out! No one sees this but us. No one sees _this_.”  
  
(It is a small house, a vacation home, he thinks. Eames doesn’t know where they are, but he thinks he can hear the beach. He wants to be able to smell salt on the air, but he can’t. The skies are blue and there is a stretch of grass at the top of a sand dune. He thinks it’s a sand dune. There is a house. It is white and the shudders are green and on the small porch is a sleeping dog. The place is empty, not a projection in sight, and as Isabelle quiets herself, as she stops yelling and as her fists still against Arthur’s chest, when she drops her head into her hands, he can hear the crash of the sea to shore).  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
In the kitchen, Arthur finally kisses him.  
  
It is chaste, experimental, and Eames can’t help but laugh into the other’s man mouth when he thinks of all they’ve done elsewhere. He knows the taste of his cock and the feel of his come on his tongue, his lips, his sister’s lips. He knows what he feels like inside him and how when he moves just right, when the angle is perfect, he can cull the neediest sounds out of him.  
  
The kiss doesn’t last long. Eames bites Arthur’s bottom lip, and then Arthur walks away.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The dreams go wrong.  
  
She is alone in a house, a house Eames believes their childhood home. It is large, sprawling, made of brick, and the chimney is smoking. She is surrounded by wrecked cars - the hoods smashed and intricate mechanics exposed, crooked bumpers left to scrape the asphalt of the road, cars flipped, blood on the windshield. Her house is the only one there, a moat of automotive wreckage, and at the front door, a leopard stands guard. There are the sounds of the jungle, but no jungle in sight. Isabelle sits alone on the front porch, a white swing, barefoot and clutching the chains on either side of her head.  
  
Arthur kills her, and then they kill themselves.  
  
He shoots her before she can speak, and she goes down with a lost and angry expression. “There were three bullets,” he tells Eames before handing him the gun.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
The drugs were Eames’s, but the consent was their own. Maybe it’s the consent aspect of this, the fact that Isabelle and Arthur signed their names to this decision, that leaves the relevance of who brought the drugs, whose drugs they originally were, a moot point. Arthur will never blame Eames, at least not outright. There will be a night misspent in Tokyo when Arthur will kiss Eames, horrible and frenetic and so unlike himself, but Eames will kiss him back, and later, he will fuck him, something foreign and new to the act despite the fact their bodies are familiar to each other.  
  
He will think of Isabelle and that day they spent in a dream on a scaling bridge and he had come to her as Arthur. Her face had been ashen and drawn; she had said, “That’s not him at all. You don’t know the first fucking thing,” but she had let him bend her over the steel girders of the bridge, nothing below her but riotous foam and sea. He fucked her, his face, his hands, his cock - all Arthur. After, she had turned to him and taken Arthur’s face in her hands, her fingers hot to the touch. “I feel as though I’ve met a stranger,” she said.  
  
(He tried the same trick on Arthur in a dream, too. Isabelle had gone to the market, she had wanted tomatoes, she wanted to make a salad that would taste of summer or so she said, and later, so many years later Arthur would say that Isabelle said a lot of things but he will be drunk and Eames will be drunker and Eames will be focused on the slight curve to the bottom of Arthur’s thin lips so he might have missed the point, he might have missed the point yet again. Isabelle wanted to build a salad, and Arthur had tried to build a maze, and Eames had tried to build Isabelle, but he failed. He failed so miserably.  
  
“What the fuck are you playing at?” Arthur had said, teeth gritted tight and face bleak.  
  
And this was before. This was before the Waits album and before the three of them joined up as one seemingly indefatigable being, but after Eames had taken Isabelle, after he had seen the shape the two made twisted about each other, and the thing he would never know, the thing he had not known then, was that the two of them had never breached that barrier before - that the physical element had arrived with Eames).  
  
They woke and Isabelle had not. Eames still doesn’t have anything clever to say about that.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They will be in Paris again. The warehouse will be cold and Ariadne will wear her scarf, her tiny frame huddled around a scaled model, and Cobb will be prone, asleep, awake elsewhere. Fischer’s face will be empty in the photograph pinned to the bulletin board.  
  
Eames will wait until evening.  
  
“There are a great many things we never speak of, aren’t there, old boy.”  
  
For a small moment Arthur will appear vulnerable. Eames never will ask after Isabelle, not directly. He will never know that Arthur moved her to California, a place more resort than institution, that it overlooks the sea, and on good days she’ll tell him about it. On the good days she’ll remember, but the good are just as unbearable as the bad, his name written in careful letters and an international number written with the same tenacity beneath, the card laminated, taped to the phone. She’ll call him. Some days she will scream at him, French and English merging into an all too intelligible cacophony, just as their mother had shouted, and she will yell the same things their mother had yelled at their father: you said forever. You promised me.  
  
Other days her voice will be small, afraid. “I can’t find you anywhere,” she will say to him. “I keep looking, but I can’t see you. How do I know this is you? Is this you? Who are you? Who is this?” And Arthur will say, patience straining against something he refuses to name (guilt love grief resentment), “Isabelle. This is Arthur. This is me.”  
  
On the bad days she will not call at all. The nurses used to phone him. “Mr. Arthur,” they would say, “Miss Isabelle is asking for you,” and he’d be able to hear her tinny voice contorted with hurt, rambling the same sad things she said the day Eames left. “We don’t live here.”  
  
“Cobb doesn’t know,” Eames will say to him, “does he.”  
  
“No.”  
  
Eames will look away, and back again. He’ll ask the one question he has wondered since they met again, only a couple of years after Paris, only a couple of years before the Fischer job.  
  
“How do you keep her out?”  
  
Arthur will lean forward. “That’s the thing,” he’ll say, the words slow yet blunt. “I don’t. She’s always in me.”  
  
It will be the most sentimental thing Eames will ever hear him say. He’ll clear his throat, stand as the chair scrapes against the floor.  
  
“I believe this is yours. Sticky fingers in my days of yore. My apologies.”  
  
He’ll drop the photograph of Isabelle to Arthur’s desk, the inscription side facing upwards.  
  
At the door, Eames will turn around, like the girl in the photograph. Arthur will take the photograph in hand and he will run his thumb over her smiling face.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
“You know how many lies Arthur used to tell me? But, but the thing was, that Arthur never thought of them as lies. He didn’t look at them like that, realize what they really were. You know Arthur. At this point, we’ve kept you around long enough, you know him. You know Arthur. And that means you’ve noticed how much he likes the truth. Arthur thinks the truth is solid and everything and anything else is just liquid, gas, things he can’t hold onto. He could have been an alchemist in that sense - cobbling together and mixing all these solid truths until they are nothing more than a great big lie. When we were little, I’d lie too, but I called it storytelling. I’d tell him that there were monsters, there were monsters in the armoire, under my bed, in the closet, that I was afraid, but I wasn’t, and I wasn’t trying to make him afraid either. I just wanted to keep him close, and I think he knew that. When I was scared, when I was truly afraid, that’s when he’d tell me his lies - you’re okay, I’m okay, they’re okay, they’ll come back, I’ll come back - everyone’s alive and everyone’s okay and everyone will come back for you.”  
  
“What happened to your parents?”  
  
“They died. They didn’t come back.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
In California, Isabelle reaches a pale hand forward and grips Arthur’s jaw.  
  
“I think we’ve met before,” she says to him, and she can feel the tic of his jaw as he grinds his teeth under her fingers.  
  
“No,” he answers. If he wants to touch her he does not make a move for her. He remains still under her hands, and in turn, her hands remain still against his face. He smiles small, the start of an inside joke. “We never met.” She frowns, and then, so does he.  
  
“Who are you?”  
  
“Isabelle,” he says, the name urgent, as though he was speaking to her through a poor telephone connection, the static threatening to overpower them at any second. “Isabelle, this is Arthur.”  
  
She smiles blankly. “It’s wonderful to meet you, Arthur.”  
  
Eames will never know of this.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
What do you love about him so goddamn much? he asked her once. It was night, but it always seemed to be night here, in Paris, in their strange flat, suspended in time. If it wasn’t night, it was just breaking day, a time as disorienting as the night, but then, then, it had been night, dark, and her face shadowed and ominous.  
  
That’s not a real question, she had answered, her hands raised over her head, and her fingers moved as though attempting cat’s cradle on nothing more than thin air and her imagination. There isn’t a laundry list of things you love about a person, she said. I can’t just say _his smile_ , I can’t just say _the way he makes me laugh_ \- and don’t look at me like that, he makes me laugh, he can be very funny, ‘specially when you least suspect it. And especially when he’s drunk.  
  
You love me? he asked, cocky and uncaring what her answer was.  
  
She had smiled then, her white teeth bright in the dark room.  
  
I love you because you’re not him. She poked him in the ribs after she said it, and he snorted, told her that sounded like a terrible thing, and she told him it wasn’t, it was the best thing, the best thing in the world to be the opposite of something a person loves because that means you shine just as bright, that means you are just as impossible to ignore and keep out of your heart.  
  
We were born in the early spring, she told Eames, unbidden.  
  
Our mother wanted to name me Lily, but all the flowers were dead.

 

 

 


End file.
